An NIH researcher has captured video images of a previously unknown form of communication between brain cells that might hold clues to the way learning shapes the brain. The videos, offered as a resource for educators teaching high school, undergraduate and graduate students, are available on the Web from Science Signaling. These newly recorded signals are emitted along the length of nerve fibers. Earlier research has documented the transmission of signals across the synapse — a gap between individual nerve cells, known as neurons. The new videos show that when neurons communicate, electrical signals emitted along the length of neurons stimulates nearby brain cells known as glia, or glial cells. As a result, the glial cells begin making a substance called myelin, which coats the nerve fibers and allows electrical charges to travel with greater speed through the brain's networks. Other studies have shown that the process of myelination underlies learning and is crucial for the development of new skills. The teaching resource on the Science Signaling website features short video clips that document these previously unknown non-synaptic signals. "For the last 100 years researchers have studied how information traverses the brain, crossing synapses and traveling from one nerve cell to the next," said Dr. Fields. "We can now see another type of communication, in which cells along a neuron’s length can sense the chemical signals the neuron releases."

Keyword: Glia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14924 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Eating foods high in trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of depression, according to a Spanish study published in the United States Wednesday, confirming previous studies that linked "junk food" with the disease. Researchers also showed that some products, such as olive oil, which is high in healthy omega-9 fatty acids, can fight against the risk of mental illness. Authors of the wide-reaching study, from the universities of Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, followed and analyzed the diet and lifestyle of over 12,000 volunteers over six years. When the study began, none of the participants had been diagnosed with depression; by the end, 657 of them were new sufferers. "Participants with an elevated consumption of trans-fats (fats present in artificial form in industrially-produced pastries and fast food...) presented up to a 48 percent increase in the risk of depression when they were compared to participants who did not consume these fats," the head study author said. Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, also noted that in the event "more trans-fats were consumed, the greater the harmful effect they produced in the volunteers." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 14923 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By Bruce Bower Sports fans have cried foul for 25 years as scientists have dumped statistical ice water on basketball players' "hot hands." It seems obvious to even casual spectators that competitors occasionally score a bunch of baskets in a row and need to keep shooting while they're in the zone. Sorry, b-ball buffs. Researchers have yet to document any chance-defying scoring runs among even the best players. Kobe Bryant may well sink shot after shot, game in and game out, but even this all-star's season-long pattern of hits and misses fits within the mathematical definition of a random sequence, scientists say. Kobe's chances of hitting a shot are no greater following a swish than a miss. Still, it's perfectly natural to assume that if a sharpshooter sinks one basket — or if a jockey rides a winning horse in the first race of the day, or if a stock goes up in value on Monday, to name a few — it boosts the probability of the same thing happening with the next shot, race or trading session, says psychologist Benjamin Scheibehenne of the University of Basel in Switzerland. In his view, effective thinkers are primed to expect streaks of the same outcome in basketball scoring and other sequences of events — the laws of probability be damned. A hair-trigger sensitivity for perceiving clumps of events makes sense because most animal species — including people — search for food and other vital resources that are typically found in patches, he asserts. Human ancestors did so. And in the modern world, information foragers on the Internet and snack seekers in the supermarket also find what they want in clusters. So a tendency to look for clumpy patterns in sequences of events pays off when it counts, even if it distorts judgments about basketball scoring and the stock market. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14922 - Posted: 01.29.2011

by Greg Miller Sizing up relationships between other people is key to success in human society. Whether your aim is navigating office politics or climbing the social ladder, you'd better know who's the chief and who's a pawn. A new study suggests that babies acquire this skill even before they learn to speak. In the 28 January issue of Science, researchers report that 10-month-old infants perceive social dominance and can predict who's likely to prevail when a conflict arises. In the past decade, developmental psychologists have shown that babies are remarkably perceptive about the social world around them. Before the end of their first year, for example, infants understand that people sometimes have competing goals, and they take notice of whether one individual helps or hinders another. In the new study, Lotte Thomsen, then a graduate student with Harvard University psychologist Susan Carey, and colleagues investigated whether infants also have expectations about who's most likely to get their way when two individuals have conflicting goals. They brought into the lab 144 infants between 8 months and 16 months old, accompanied by their mothers. Seated on mom's lap, each baby watched videos starring two crude cartoon figures—each essentially a block with an eye and a mouth (see video). (Psychologists often use simplified figures like these instead of more realistic ones to avoid confounding cues from facial expressions, gestures, or body posture.) © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14921 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB The men of old, reported Socrates, saw madness as a gift that provides knowledge or inspiration. “It was when they were mad that the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona achieved so much; . . . when sane they did little or nothing.” Today, insanity can still bring the gift of knowledge, but in a different manner. Much of what we know about the brain comes from seeing what happens when it is damaged, or affected in unusual ways. If the Delphic seer were to turn up tomorrow, neuroscientists would whisk her straight off into a brain scanner. V. S. Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, has done as much as anyone to reveal the workings of the mind through the malfunctions of the brain. We meet some mighty strange malfunctions in his new book, “The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human.” There is a man who, after a head injury, cannot recognize or respond to people when he sees them, but can happily chat on the phone. We meet a woman who laughs when she should be yelping in pain. There are patients with Capgras syndrome, who come to believe that people who are close to them (or, in one case, the patient’s poodle) are imposters. We meet unfortunates with an intense desire to have their own healthy limbs amputated, others who are paralyzed on one side but insist against all evidence that they are not, and, in Cotard’s syndrome, people who sincerely believe they are dead. Ramachandran weaves such tales together to build a picture of the specialized areas of the brain and the pathways between them, drawing his map by relating particular types of damage to their corresponding mental deficits. A recurring theme is the way in which many delusions appear to result from the brain trying to make sense of signals that have gone haywire. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Laterality
Link ID: 14920 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN When inexperienced chess players sit down to play against experts, they probably wonder what it is that makes the experts so good that it seems they are almost playing a different game. New research suggests that one difference is that the experts use more of their brains. In a study in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, a team of scientists in Germany showed experts and novices simple geometric objects and simple chess positions and asked the subjects to identify them. Reaction times were measured and brain activity was monitored using functional M.R.I. scans. On the identification of the geometric objects, the subjects performed the same, showing that the chess experts had no special visualization skills. When the subjects were shown the chess positions, the experts identified them faster. Focusing on an element of an earlier study on pattern and object recognition by chess experts, the researchers had expected to see parts of the left hemispheres of the experts’ brains — which are involved in object recognition — react more quickly than those of the novices when they performed the chess tasks. But the reaction times were the same. What set the experts apart was that parts of their right brain hemispheres — which are more involved in pattern recognition — also lit up with activity. The experts were processing the information in two places at once. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Laterality
Link ID: 14919 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times Among the offerings at this year's Sundance Film Festival is a documentary about a trailblazing chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky who played a key role in the scientific debate over what it means to be human. The James Marsh film, "Project Nim," explores the life of the primate — cheekily named after linguist Noam Chomsky — that was raised like a human child and taught American Sign Language in the 1970s in an effort to prove that language was not exclusive to humans. Four decades later, the questions raised by the experiment are still far from settled. As an infant, Chimpsky was taken to live with the LaFarge family in New York City. There, among seven human "siblings," he was raised just as a human child, taught to sign, dressed in sweaters, even breastfed from his human foster mother. Get important science news and discoveries delivered to your inbox with our Science & Environment newsletter. Sign up » "It was really 'Brady Bunch Plus Chimp,' with a mess of children coming and going," said Elizabeth Hess, whose book "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human" served as the foundation for the film. The arrangement was intended to settle a longstanding feud between Chomsky and psychologist B.F. Skinner about whether language was the key factor that separated humans from other animals, Hess said: "Skinner argued that even chimps could acquire language and Chomsky said language was exclusive to humans." Los Angeles Times, Copyright 2011

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 14918 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By Emily Sohn Frédéric Chopin's music was moving and expressive. But the Polish composer and pianist was a frail and sickly man who died young; his life ended just 39 years after it began. Over the years, experts have proposed a variety of diagnoses for Chopin's health woes, ranging from bipolar disorder to pulmonary tuberculosis. A new analysis adds another theory. Regular hallucinations, bouts of melancholy and other symptoms point to epilepsy, the researchers say. Their findings may offer new insight into a gifted man and his brief life. "The hallucinations of Chopin were considered the manifestation of a sensitive soul, a romantic cliché," said Manuel Várquez Caruncho, a radiologist at the Xeral-Calde Hospital Complex in Lugo, Spain. "We think that to split the romanticized view from reality could help to better understand the man." The results of Chopin's autopsy have long been lost, but plenty of scientists and historians have written about the composer's health. Born in 1810, Chopin suffered throughout his life from breathing troubles and fevers. He was emaciated, coughed often and had frequent lung infections. He had diarrhea as a teen and severe headaches in adulthood. Melancholy plagued him. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 14917 - Posted: 01.25.2011

by Deborah Kotz Want to help your kid avoid a weight problem? Limiting fast-food meals and screen time is a start, but parents may also want to set an earlier bedtime. That's the conclusion of a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. The University of Chicago researchers monitored the sleep patterns of 308 children ages 4 to 10 for a week and compared their sleep patterns with their body mass index. Kids who had a healthy BMI got about the same amount of sleep every night -- about 8 hours -- but then slept in on the weekends to make up for lost sleep. Obese kids, on the other hand, tended to get fewer and fewer hours of sleep as the week progressed and tended not to make up for lost sleep on the weekends. The combination of large sleep variations and not enough catch-up sleep on the weekend was linked to worse health effects such as high levels of insulin, "bad" LDL cholesterol, and the inflammation marker C-reactive protein -- all of which raise the risk of future diabetes and heart disease. Like adults, kids who don't sleep enough may eat extra fat and calories to give themselves an energy boost to overcome chronic drowsiness. "Sleep patterns at the lower end of sleep duration, particularly in the presence of irregularity, were strongly associated with increased health risk," the researchers wrote. Of course, this doesn't prove that too little sleep actually causes obesity and other ill health effects. It could simply be that kids with erratic sleep patterns have other health habits that predispose them to obesity like poorer nutrition habits or less physical activity. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 14916 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By CARL ZIMMER In the middle of a phone call four years ago, Paula Niedenthal began to wonder what it really means to smile. The call came from a Russian reporter, who was interviewing Dr. Niedenthal about her research on facial expressions. “At the end he said, ‘So you are American?’ ” Dr. Niedenthal recalled. Indeed, she is, although she was then living in France, where she had taken a post at Blaise Pascal University. “So you know,” the Russian reporter informed her, “that American smiles are all false, and French smiles are all true.” “Wow, it’s so interesting that you say that,” Dr. Niedenthal said diplomatically. Meanwhile, she was imagining what it would have been like to spend most of her life surrounded by fake smiles. “I suddenly became interested in how people make these kinds of errors,” Dr. Niedenthal said. But finding the source of the error would require knowing what smiles really are — where they come from and how people process them. And despite the fact that smiling is one of the most common things that we humans do, Dr. Niedenthal found science’s explanation for it to be weak. “I think it’s pretty messed up,” she said. “I think we don’t know very much, actually, and it’s something I want to take on.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14915 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A new study suggests that a widely prescribed antidepressant may provide at least some relief for women with hot flashes. Hormone replacement therapy is now the only treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration for menopausal symptoms, but many believe its risks outweigh its benefits. This study, published Thursday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, was a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial of escitalopram (brand name Lexapro) in which 97 menopausal women took the drug for eight weeks while a matched group took a placebo. Just over half of the women in the treatment group reported a decrease of at least 50 percent in the frequency of hot flashes; 36 percent did in the placebo group. Women taking escitalopram averaged 1.41 fewer hot flashes per day than in those on the placebo, and there were no serious side effects. And almost two-thirds of the treatment group wanted to continue the medication, compared with 42 percent of the others. The lead author, Ellen W. Freeman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, stressed that this is an off-label use of the drug not approved by the F.D.A. Still, she said, “it provides an option, and there’s not much out there that has been shown to be effective.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 14914 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By Christof Koch Perceptual psychology and the brain sciences emphasize the communality in the way that people experience reality. Leaving aside cases of brain damage or mental disease, we all see the sun rise in the east, enjoy the scent of a rose and experience a jolt of fear when we are woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of breaking glass. This is a reflection of the great similarities of our brains compared with the brains of our close cousins on the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Laboratory science reinforces this bias by lumping together the performance of its subjects on any one experiment and reporting only the average and the variation around this mean. This conflation is also true for the telltale hot spots that show up in functional magnetic resonance brain images that we are used to seeing in newspapers, in magazines such as this one, on television and in the movies. Yet as we know from our own life, each one of us has his or her own preferences, likes and dislikes. Some people are acutely sensitive to flashing lights, some have perfect pitch, some cannot see in depth, some can introspect and analyze their own failures and triumphs, whereas others—remarkably frequently, public figures such as politicians—lack this knack. Take me. I am hopelessly attracted to brilliant colors. As a magpie is drawn to anything glittering, I am drawn to school-bus yellow, tangerine orange, burgundy red, rich magenta, electric violet, imperial purple and navy blue. My love of the garish is reflected in my flowery shirts and pants and, I’m sure, in an enhanced cortical representation of these hues. It is obvious that if the apparatus that senses the world differs between two individuals, then the conscious experience of the brains wired to these sensors cannot be the same either. In a previous Consciousness Redux column, I discussed color blindness—the fact that about 7 percent of men lack one of the genes for the retinal photopigments needed to see hue. But what about differences in the brain proper? Do they influence consciousness in measurable ways? To answer this question, scientists must plumb the minds of many individuals and relate them to measures of their brains. The widespread availability of fMRI scanners makes such a project feasible today. © 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 14913 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey “You must remember this,” Sam the piano player crooned to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. The couple might have recalled even more about their days in Paris if they’d been napping when Sam played the tune again. Replaying memories while people are awake leaves their memories subject to tinkering. But reactivating memories during sleep protects them from interference, researchers in Germany and Switzerland report online January 23 in Nature Neuroscience. The finding shows that the brain handles memories differently during sleep than while awake, says Sara Mednick, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the research. Armed with this new knowledge, she says, therapists may be able to destabilize traumatic memories and overwrite the bad memories with good ones, then solidify the new memory with a nap. In the new study, volunteers played a Concentration-type game in which they had to remember the locations of pairs of cards. Meanwhile, a mask wafted a slightly unpleasant odor into the volunteers’ nostrils. Once the volunteers had mastered the game, some stayed awake while others took about a 40-minute nap. Researchers reactivated the memory in some volunteers by releasing the odor again. After the nappers woke up, the volunteers played a slightly different version of the card game and were tested to see how well they recalled the locations of the original cards. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14912 - Posted: 01.25.2011

By Bruce Bower Young kids lacking self-management skills are way more than annoying. They’re more likely to be big-time losers in the game of life, a new study finds. Low levels of conscientiousness, perseverance and other elements of self-control in youngsters as young as age 3 herald high rates of physical health problems, substance abuse, financial woes, criminal arrests and single parenthood by age 32, says an international team led by psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Increasing self-control difficulties among children herald progressively greater numbers and seriousness of these adult troubles, the scientists report online January 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, has long held sway as the prime mental influence on health and achievement. But self-control’s close link to adult health and accomplishment remained after researchers accounted for children’s IQ scores and family income. “Self-control and intelligence are both valuable for life success, but after years of effort, IQ has proven difficult to change through interventions,” Moffitt says. For as-yet-unknown reasons, 7 percent of youngsters in the long-term study developed notably better self-control as they got older. Members of this group displayed better health, made more money and had fewer criminal run-ins as adults than would have been predicted by their self-control levels as young children. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 14911 - Posted: 01.25.2011

Cooling the brain of patients who have suffered a stroke could dramatically improve their recovery, a group of Scottish doctors has said. They are joining others from across Europe who believe that inducing hypothermia in some patients can boost survival rates and reduce brain damage. Similar techniques have already been tried successfully on heart attack patients and those with birth injuries. Scientists are in Brussels to discuss a Europe-wide trial of the technique. To date, studies have involved the body of patients being cooled using ice cold intravenous drips and cooling pads applied to the skin. This lowers the body temperature to about 35C, just a couple of degrees below its normal level. The technique puts the body into a state of artificial hibernation, where the brain can survive with less blood supply, giving doctors vital time to treat blocked or burst blood vessels. Dr Malcolm Macleod, head of experimental neuroscience at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Every day 1,000 Europeans die from stroke - that's one every 90 seconds - and about twice that number survive but are disabled. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 14910 - Posted: 01.24.2011

HOUSTON — The Houston hospital treating Rep. Gabrielle Giffords said Sunday that her condition is improving daily, but gave no update on the buildup of brain fluid that has kept the Arizona congresswoman in intensive care. A hospital statement said Giffords would continue to receive therapy in the intensive care unit "until her physicians determine she is ready for transfer" to a nearby center where she would begin a full rehabilitation program. They said the next medical updates would be provided when that happens. Giffords was flown to Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center Hospital on Friday from Tucson, where she was shot in the forehead on Jan. 8 while meeting with constituents. Story: Case in Giffords shooting likely to take years At a news conference shortly after her arrival in Houston, doctors said she had been given a tube to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid. Everyone makes such fluid, but an injury can cause the fluid to not be cleared away as rapidly as normal. A backup can cause pressure and swelling within the brain. "It's a common problem," occurring in 15 to 20 percent of people with a brain injury or brain surgery, said Dr. Reid C. Thompson, chairman of neurological surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, who is not involved in Giffords' care. Another possible reason for a drainage tube: "After a gunshot wound to the head and brain where there is a lot of soft tissue injury, it is common to develop a leak of spinal fluid. This raises the risk of a meningitis and slows down wound healing," he said. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 14909 - Posted: 01.24.2011

(PARIS-AFP) - Good news for chronic migraine sufferers: even the most severe forms of these blindingly painful headaches do not cause damage to the brain. "It is almost always the first question that migraine patients ask," said Christophe Tzourio, a doctor and researcher at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, and the main architect of a study published online this week in the British Medical Journal. "Today we can provide an answer: there's nothing to worry about," he told AFP. Migraines are acutely debilitating headaches -- sometimes with an "aura", in which patients have the impression of seeing through frosted glass -- that strike around one out of nine adults. The causes remain uncertain, but are known to involve a link with blood vessels in the brain. Earlier research using magnetic resonance imaging technology showed that people with a history of full-on migraines are more likely to incur tiny lesions to microvessels inside the brain. Such ruptures result from a deterioration of the small cerebral arteries that supply blood to so-called white matter, which facilitates the flow on information across different parts of the brain. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14908 - Posted: 01.24.2011

* By Jonah Lehrer Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.” We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand new paper in Nature Neuroscience by a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored. © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Hearing; Emotions
Link ID: 14907 - Posted: 01.24.2011

In 2004, American neuroscientists Linda Buck and Richard Axel shared a Nobel Prize for their identification of the genes that control smell, findings which they first published in the early 1990s. Their work revived interest in the mysterious workings of our noses, interest which is now generating some surprising insights – not least that each of us inhabits our own, personal olfactory world. "When I give talks, I always say that everybody in this room smells the world with a different set of receptors, and therefore it smells different to everybody," says Andreas Keller, a geneticist working at the Rockefeller University in New York City. He also suspects that every individual has at least one odorant he or she cannot detect at all – one specific anosmia, or olfactory "blind spot", which is inherited along with his or her olfactory apparatus. The human nose contains roughly 400 olfactory receptors, each of which responds to several odorants, and each of which is encoded by a different gene. But, says Boris Schilling, a biochemist working for Givaudan, the world's largest flavour and fragrance company, based in Geneva, Switzerland, "unless you are dealing with identical twins, no two persons will have the same genetic make-up for those receptors." The reason, according to Doron Lancet, a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is that those genes have been accumulating mutations over evolution. This has happened in all the great apes, and one possible explanation is that smell has gradually become less important to survival, having been replaced to some extent by colour vision – as an indicator of rotten fruit, for example, or of a potentially venomous predator. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14906 - Posted: 01.24.2011

By Bruce Bower In chimpanzees, as in humans, faces are personality billboards, a new study suggests. People can usually tell whether or not a chimp acts dominantly and is physically active simply by looking at a picture of the ape’s expressionless mug, says a research team led by psychologist Robert Ward of Bangor University, Wales. Consistent with earlier evidence from other researchers, Ward and his colleagues reported last year that volunteers can also accurately detect whether people are extroverted, emotionally stable, agreeable and imaginative by looking at pictures of their neutral-looking faces. Extroversion in people and dominance in chimps both relate to assertiveness and sociability, and both partly derive from an individual’s genetic makeup. An ability to discern key personality traits via facial structure evolved more than 7 million years ago in a shared ancestor of people and chimps, the researchers propose in a paper published online January 14 in Evolution and Human Behavior. “The fact that chimpanzee facial signals can be read by humans suggests that our ability to read others’ faces accurately is not solely acquired through culture, but is part of an evolved system,” Ward says. That’s an intriguing hypothesis in need of testing with composite images that digitally combine many pictures of the same chimps into single mug shots, remarks psychologist and chimp researcher Lisa Parr of Emory University in Atlanta. Composites minimize slight variations from one photograph to another in lighting, skin hue, head angles and other factors that can create different personality impressions of the same individual, Parr says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14905 - Posted: 01.24.2011